The layout of text being read affects comprehension and time. Line length is an important factor in reading time and comprehension in reading. In general, very short and very long line lengths slow down reading speed because of the disruption of normal eye movements.
A special method for text layout, Visual Syntactic Text Format (VSTF), has been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,802,533, which is incorporated herein in its entirety by specific reference for all purposes. Lines in a text are truncated on the basis of syntactic principles, and the level of the syntactic phrase in the sentence determines the indentation of a line. It has been shown that the VSTF layout results in an improvement in reading proficiency.